14 DAY TRIAL // The folks working at Opera Software launched a new version of their famous Opera browser but this time, it comes with a brand new name and several goodies for its users. Codenamed Kestrel, Opera 9.5 Alpha bundles VoiceOver support and an improved BitTorrent performance, a function that was often criticized by the peer-to-peer fans. In addition, the status bar offers two new controls for a better browsing experience: zoom and image manipulation. The innovation comes from the full history search that allows you to find a visited website in a matter of seconds straight from the interface of the browser.
"Unlike previous and other browser history searches which only look at the URLs of the pages you have visited full history search searches the actual content of the Web pages you have visited. When typing a keyword, Opera 9.5 will automatically search the text of Web pages in your history," the parent company mentioned in the description of the application.
Obviously, Kestrel is available for several platforms including Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Although the developers didn't mention it, I bet Kestrel will be also available in a mobile flavor.
Because I'm sure you expected it, I should tell you that Opera 9.5 Alpha also includes several mail improvements that will allow you to control the inbox easier than before. Beside the functionality updates, the browser comes with "a new mail backend and new IMAP support."
"Note to existing M2 users: Please be aware that you will need to install this version on top of your existing Opera version to use this version for mail. Opera will then re-index all your email, something which can take several minutes if you have thousands of emails," Opera Software wanted to mention.
As you can see, the battle between the web-browser is getting more and more interesting as numerous companies are attracted by the competition. Opera seems to become one of the top competitors after Safari also joined the fight which was led until now by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and by Mozilla's Firefox.